Apple has approved iTether, a $15 app that allows Mac and Windows users to connect their iPhones to their computers over USB and then get online over a 3G connection without the need for a special tethering plan. You can download the app here.

The first beta version of iOS 5 has only been out for about a week, but it's already clear that no other pre-release version of iOS has ever seen a wider release than this one. It's hard to pinpoint why this is the case, but there are clearly enough users who either paid $99 per year to become part of Apple's developer program or who paid a rogue activation service a few dollars to get access to the beta that way. As iOS developer Malcom Barclay notes, this wide release has some interesting consequences for developers: some users are now leaving negative iTunes reviews for apps that don't work on iOS 5 yet.

In what, as far as I know, is an unprecedented move for Apple, the company this morning announced what it plans to announce during its keynote at the company’s Wordwide Developer Conference (WWDC) next week. Typically, these events are shrouded in mystery and the days ahead of the conference are ripe with rumors and speculations as to what will be announced and who will announce it. Not so this year. Apple didn’t just announce the obvious – that we will see a preview of iOS5 and OS X Lion, but also that it will indeed launch a new suite of cloud-based services under the rumored iCloud name. While the Apple Kremlinologists will continue to speculate whether the fact that Apple announced that its “CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off” the event means that Steve Jobs is coming back from his medical leave or not, the fact that Apple pre-announced Jobs’ presence at the event is also unprecedented.

Apple just released an update to its iOS operating system for iPads and iPhones. After the “scandal” around the discover of a location database on the iPhone 4 and 3G-enabled iPads, Apple promised to quickly fix this bug.

Apple today issued a response to the controversy around the location database on modern iOS devices that a group of researches discovered last week. Apple categorically denies that it is tracking its users. The database on the phone, according to Apple, does not track a user’s location but is actually a crowdsourced database of nearby WiFi hotspots and cell towers around the users’ location.

The iPhone location scandal dominated the tech news today. While early reports seemed to indicate that all iPhone 4s and 3G-enabled iPads were keeping precise logs of everybody’s location over time, the reality that emerged over the course of the day is a bit more complicated. Atlanta-based tech blogger Will Clarke took a closer look at the data tonight and argues that Apple is decidedly not keeping a log of the phone’s location in this secret file, but is only storing the location of cell towers.

Zite is a personalized magazine app for Apple's iPad that gives you far better reading recommendations than any of its competitors like Flipboard or Sobees' NewsMix. Instead of having to rely on your friends on Twitter and Facebook to recommend interesting stories to you, Zite's algorithms are only seeded by looking at your Twitter and Google Reader feed. After this, Zite will learn which articles you are most interested in by looking at your reading behavior as you use the app.

Apple seeded the first preview of OS X 10.7 Lion to its developer community yesterday. This is the first time developers get to play with the next version of Apple’s operating system. The company gave us a first peek at Lion during an event in October last year, but has been rather quiet about it since. We got our hands on a copy of Lion today and decided to give it a try.

The Daily, News Coprp.'s much hyped and buggy iPad-only newspaper just got a much-needed update. Even though the launch of The Daily was delayed by months, the first version of the app quickly turned out to be extremely buggy (I couldn't even start it for the last few days) and quite a disaster when it came to usability. Today's update does little to fix any of the usability problems, but at least the app loads again.

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